Journey with me, subby, back to the early 1600s. You remember studying the 1600s, right? It was a great time of science and learning, but it it was also a great time of scientific misunderstanding. The best of times and the worst of times, if you want to cite a book that's about to be a very, very big Christmas movie. If you're into that sort of gay musical thing, I mean. I'm certainly not, but whatever floats your boat.

But anyway, I distract myself. My point is that, back in the 1600s, everybody -- and I do mean everybody, every peasant and every scientist and every priest, every-freakin'-body--believed in something called Heliocentrism. Which basically was the belief that everything rotated around the sun. No, wait, that's the way it really is. It's the belief that everything rotates around the earth.

No, wait, I was right the first time. Heliocentrism is the belief that everything rotates around the sun, but it's not what everybody believed. Everybody believed that second thing I wrote, about stuff orbiting earth. I don't know what they called it. Earth-centrism maybe. Or Terra-centrism, scientists like using the word "Terra" instead of "Earth" because it's Latin and sounds fancier. But, so, everybody believed in Terra-centrism, and then along comes this guy named Galileo, had the gumption, the guts, the stones to stand up to the world and say NO. The universe is HELIOCENTRIC. Everything orbits the SUN, not the other way around!

Well, as you might imagine, people were pissed off. Nobody likes their entire universe being questioned. Galileo (his friends called him Leo) was imprisoned in his own house, which doesn't sound to bad until you realize they didn't have electricity back then. No TV, no radio, no internet. Imagine that. He was imprisoned for years. But he stuck to his guns. And, eventually, everybody realized that he was right, after all. The sun IS at the center of the universe.

So think about it. If you were to take your fancy little pie chart and publish it back in the 1600s, what would it look like? The red sliver, which represents plucky ol' Leo, would barely be there at all. And the massive black chunk would represent everybody else who thought he was wrong. AND HE WASN'T WRONG. So what's that tell?

Remember -- being correct means having the courage to stand up to the world when you know you're in the right. It means being the lone voice in a tempest, the single drop in an ocean. Learn from Leo, who was immortalized centuries later in Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, which tells the story of his struggle to shine truth into the world. I find him absolutely inspiring.

doyner:Interesting how the vast majority of people that reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change are willing to believe claims made in texts that are mellinia old without any skepticism....

Chigau:I don't doubt that the climate is changing, i simply doubt that we fully understand why. We only have a few hundred years of recorded history, and even less of that directly pertains to the environment, The rest is supposition based off of geological and anthropological studies. And all of this is meant to make us think we know what is normal in the lifespan of a planet?

I cant help but feel that this is like looking at one month in the life of a 14 year old to try and determine what its entire history was and will be, as well as why.

That doesn't mean that the concerns of environmentalists are wrong, if anything they are good ideas for their own sake. It just means, in my mind, that we aren't able to truly say there is a direct correlation between some things.

Look, I'm not saying internal combustion is impossible, I'm just saying that we simply do not fully understand how it happens. I just find it really hard to believe that we could have several chambers simultaneously taking a mixture of air and fuel, compressing this mixture, subsequently igniting it to produce power. I have seen what 20 gallons of gasoline can do and it doesn't just produce power, it is deadly. I just don't think we can look at all of these cars driving around and just assume that this is a safe and practical means of transportation. They are essentially rolling bombs. I think we should just wait until all of the science is in on this before we all rush out to dealerships and start purchasing these automobiles. And when we do get to this point, there better not be ANYONE telling me that the exhaust produced by these engines negatively affect air quality, carbon levels, etc. My mind will be made up at that point.

Things I do not understand are impossible, but once I understand it, NOTHING will change my mind.

"We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I'm tired of this shiat. I'm tired of f-ing Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shiat about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shiat, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"

Are you skeptical about whether vaccines really don't cause autism too? I mean, autism rates have gone up, and vaccination rates have gone up. There are some scientists who think that vaccines cause autism. I'm just asking questions.

"In the last 75 years, mankind has consumed and burned more resources than in the entire history of the Earth combined".

The Earth has been around for approximately 4.5 billion years. A lot has happened in that time, certainly. But consider that in a time span of only 75 years, a blink of an eye in comparison with the age of the planet, we have burned more gas, more diesel, clear-cut more forests and polluted more air to travel trillions of miles in planes, cars, trains and buses. And in that same span we have industrialized vast swaths of the planet for the sole purpose of producing stuff.

And there are those that would have us believe that this utterly unprecedented impact to the environment has had no consequence whatsoever.

Diogenes:doyner: Interesting how the vast majority of people that reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change are willing to believe claims made in texts that are mellinia old without any skepticism....

Interesting how the vast majority of people that reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change are willing to believe claims made in texts that are mellinia old without any skepticism....

There's also this simple little fact: if you were born after February 1985, you have never experienced a month where the global temperature was below the 20th century average. One month proves nothing. One year proves nothing. 332 months in a row? Only an ignorant fool would claim temperatures are not rising when confronted with the near statistical impossibility of that fact.

Tatterdemalian:whidbey: Frederick: Do you have trouble with reading comprehension?

You do. You keep using words like "debatable." Did you have trouble reading TFA? Maybe you should eye the pie chart posted earlier. My favorite flavor. Cherry red.

1. The Church science of AGW does not debate those who are inferior to it. endlessly repeat long debunked talking points.2. Anyone who disagrees with any of the tenets of the Church of AGW are, by definition, inferior. science is welcome to challenge it. When their challenges are shown to be idiotic propaganda they will be mocked.3. Therefore, the tenets of the Church of AGW are, by definition, not debatable. uneducated idiots are unable to defent their positions and the the stupidity of their arguments is pointed out every time they regurgitate them.

/this exercise in circular logic has been brought to you by the anti-science movement of America//not adapted ... they never adapt

Are you aware that if one removes the stations installed since the 1980s from the data, the warmest period in the USA is in the 1930s and not today? While that is not world wide, it implies something significant.

Why remove any data? You can build it into the model. Boobies.

You could, but the scientists at the CRU did not. You really are a tool.

And....Boobies to you too..

I have spent enough time dealing with a moron like you pretending to know something. Consider yourself and your boobies ignored. You are obviously an idiot.

Some people ignore trolls.Some people ignore assholes.chuckufarlie ignores facts.

In the language of science, the word "law" describes an analytic statement. It gives us a formula that tells us what things will do. For example, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation tells us that "Every point mass attracts every single point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is directly proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses." That formula will let us calculate the gravitational pull between the Earth and the object you dropped, between the Sun and Mars, or between me and a bowl of ice cream.

We can use Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation to calculate how strong the gravitational pull is between the Earth and the object you dropped, which would let us calculate its acceleration as it falls, how long it will take to hit the ground, how fast it would be going at impact, how much energy it will take to pick it up again, etc.

While the law lets us calculate quite a bit about what happens, notice that it does not tell us anything about why it happens. That is what theories are for. In the language of science, the word "theory" is used to describe an explanation of why and how things happen. For gravity, we use Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to explain why things fall.

A theory starts as one or more hypotheses, untested ideas about why something happens. For example, I might propose a hypothesis that the object that you released fell because it was pulled by the Earth's magnetic field. Once we started testing, it would not take long to find out that my hypothesis was not supported by the evidence. Non-magnetic objects fall at the same rate as magnetic objects. Because it was not supported by the evidence, my hypothesis does not gain the status of being a theory. To become a scientific theory, an idea must be thoroughly tested, and must be an accurate and predictive description of the natural world.

While laws rarely change, theories change frequently as new evidence is discovered. Instead of being discarded due to new evidence, theories are often revised to include the new evidence in their explanation. The Theory of General Relativity has adapted as new technologies and new evidence have expanded our view of the universe.

So when we are scientifically discussing gravity, we can talk about the law that describes the attraction between two objects, and we can also talk about the theory that describes why the objects attract each other

RobertBruce:And before 1.3 million years ago we were warmer for a long long time. Sure we're changing. It's the "human caused" that is bullshiat.

I blame Women's Liberation.

Have you ever looked in a woman's supply cabinet?

There is shiat in there that is DEADLY TOXIC.

The increase in fossil fuel consumption?

Excuse me, it has gone up every single year since we stopped chaining them to the stove, and don't get me started on the energy costs of all of those labor saving devices that are pitched to women, and the fact that they have to drive across town to get a tube of Frosty Passionfruit Pink lipstick.

After them comes the Gubbermint.

If climate change was such a big issue, why haven't we diverted 50% of all fund raise to adapting to it?

Cut the Defense budget, climate change will get us all before the Soviets or ChiComs will.

And why haven't we fully used the the atom? Why are we wasting time with the whole Green Energy, when we could have built 1000 new nuclear power plants with what we have tossed down a rat hole on renewable energy.

Cowards one and all. When the warmists start self immoleating to ease the human burden of Gaiam, maybe I'll sign on to reduce my foot print. Because that really does produce a lot of carbon, ask Himmler.

Pocket Ninja:Journey with me, subby, back to the early 1600s. You remember studying the 1600s, right? It was a great time of science and learning, but it it was also a great time of scientific misunderstanding. The best of times and the worst of times, if you want to cite a book that's about to be a very, very big Christmas movie. If you're into that sort of gay musical thing, I mean. I'm certainly not, but whatever floats your boat.

But anyway, I distract myself. My point is that, back in the 1600s, everybody -- and I do mean everybody, every peasant and every scientist and every priest, every-freakin'-body--believed in something called Heliocentrism. Which basically was the belief that everything rotated around the sun. No, wait, that's the way it really is. It's the belief that everything rotates around the earth.

No, wait, I was right the first time. Heliocentrism is the belief that everything rotates around the sun , but it's not what everybody believed. Everybody believed that second thing I wrote, about stuff orbiting earth. I don't know what they called it. Earth-centrism maybe. Or Terra-centrism, scientists like using the word "Terra" instead of "Earth" because it's Latin and sounds fancier. But, so, everybody believed in Terra-centrism, and then along comes this guy named Galileo, had the gumption, the guts, the stones to stand up to the world and say NO. The universe is HELIOCENTRIC. Everything orbits the SUN, not the other way around!

Well, as you might imagine, people were pissed off. Nobody likes their entire universe being questioned. Galileo (his friends called him Leo) was imprisoned in his own house, which doesn't sound to bad until you realize they didn't have electricity back then. No TV, no radio, no internet. Imagine that. He was imprisoned for years. But he stuck to his guns. And, eventually, everybody realized that he was right, after all. The sun IS at the center of the universe.

So think about it. If you were to take your fancy little pie chart and publish it back in the 1600s, what would it look like? The red sliver, which represents plucky ol' Leo, would barely be there at all. And the massive black chunk would represent everybody else who thought he was wrong. AND HE WASN'T WRONG. So what's that tell?

Remember -- being correct means having the courage to stand up to the world when you know you're in the right. It means being the lone voice in a tempest, the single drop in an ocean. Learn from Leo, who was immortalized centuries later in Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, which tells the story of his struggle to shine truth into the world. I find him absolutely inspiring..

What I get from that graph is that temperatures fell sharply from 1940 to 1950. Therefore, I must conclude that the rise of Nazism and/or global warfare can reduce the temperature anomaly significantly. I'd wager that industrialism was pretty high during that time as most of the world was busy building tanks, ships, planes, guns, bombs, testing nukes, etc, all things that put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I propose we reanimate Hitler (he's not really dead, you know) and pick a fight with Iran, Syria, Lybia, Russia and whoever else might want to fight for a bit. It should only take about 40 years of global war to return to pre 1900 temperatures.

My neocon friend, who, at times, I barely resist slapping in the back of the head, is convinced that scientists are making up global warming so they can get their sweet, sweet hands on some of that grant money. He apparently believes that grant money comes in massive blocks and that a scientist uses it not for research, but to buy himself nice things. He told me once that he wanted to be a scientist so he could use the grant money to buy himself a bigger house.

Endive Wombat:BigBurrito: Endive Wombat: All I am going to add to this is that my understanding about those who question global warming is this (and let's be honest, it is a major sticking point): What is its cause and what, if anything can we do about it?

I believe many people have stopped worrying about the cause, and very, very few holdouts cling to denying its existence.

The consequences of global warming are still very much up for debate, even within the sciences. What happens, when does it happen, and what may change the outcome? Hell, if we have a very large Volcanic eruption the ash will cool the atmosphere. T

I think that is where the former deniers are moving to. Better to debate future consequences, that can be neither proved or disproved. Kind of like conspiracy theories, it has the ability to grab peoples imaginations. That is a good and fun thing and has the benefit of enabling research to proceed without as much political interference.

Well, several hundred years ago, the Earth was warmed (Medieval Warm Period) and cooled (Little Ice Age) with what I think most people will agree as zero influence by humans as we were not contributing much to the total Earth's CO2 output at that point in time.

Again, with what little I have studied, I am more apt to believe that sun spots and other Earthly/Nature based factors contribute 98% of global warming. While I am not denying the fact that we more than likely contribute somewhat to Global Warming...I just suspect that there are other, much larger factors at play that try as we may, we will never be able to overcome and will have almost zero ability to do anything about it.

Its too bad we haven't been monitering the suns output for decades now. It would be really cool if we could just rule this kind of shiat out.

Lucky LaRue:All that shows is scientist are worse than the average population when it comes to group-think.

Yeah. It's even worse among professional geographers. 100% of them think the Earth is round. Sheep.

... and in summary: If scientists don't agree on global warming, then global warming is wrong. If scientists do agree on global warming, they're delusional group-thinkers, then global warming is wrong. Either way, global warming is wrong, so it hardly matters what scientists think. Right?

Endive Wombat:All I am going to add to this is that my understanding about those who question global warming is this (and let's be honest, it is a major sticking point): What is its cause and what, if anything can we do about it?

IIRC the human contribution to total yearly CO2 output is something on the order of less than one half of one percent (0.05%). Volcanoes, oceanic outgassings, cow farts/non human animal farts and rotting plant matter are the major contributors to the Earth's CO2 .

/I have not done any research on the matter and may be totally wrong about my second paragraph...I cannot remember where I heard this stuff from...CNN, Fox....???

Diogenes:cameroncrazy1984: Diogenes: doyner: Interesting how the vast majority of people that reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change are willing to believe claims made in texts that are mellinia old without any skepticism....

cameroncrazy1984:Diogenes: doyner: Interesting how the vast majority of people that reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change are willing to believe claims made in texts that are mellinia old without any skepticism....

BigBurrito:tobcc: Dont get me wrong, I think we as humans have changed the climate, but.. we are looking at data from ~100 years, the world is 6 billion years old (or 4000 if that is your thing). It is still a really small sample size.

This is wrong. We have data going back much, much, much further:

Link

Scroll down to temperature and CO2 graph.

Of course understanding how we can reconstruct temperature data requires understanding a bit more science, therefore many will dismiss it. It is interesting that they can reconstruct CO2 levels, and dust levels as well.

GAT_00:There's also this simple little fact: if you were born after February 1985, you have never experienced a month where the global temperature was below the 20th century average. One month proves nothing. One year proves nothing. 332 months in a row? Only an ignorant fool would claim temperatures are not rising when confronted with the near statistical impossibility of that fact.

Dont get me wrong, I think we as humans have changed the climate, but.. we are looking at data from ~100 years, the world is 6 billion years old (or 4000 if that is your thing). It is still a really small sample size.

//dont worry, I think we need to get off fosell fuels, and have clean air too/// am a hippy (not really a dirty one though)